Talk:What Do You Care What Other People Think?

This article is within the scope of WikiProject Books. To participate in the project, please visit its page, where you can join the project and discuss matters related to book articles. To use this banner, please refer to the documentation. To improve this article, please refer to the relevant guideline for the type of work.BooksWikipedia:WikiProject BooksTemplate:WikiProject BooksBook articles

Physics: Publications Low‑importance

	Physics portal This article is within the scope of WikiProject Physics, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of Physics on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.PhysicsWikipedia:WikiProject PhysicsTemplate:WikiProject Physicsphysics articles
Low	This article has been rated as Low-importance on the project's importance scale.
	This article is supported by Publications Taskforce.

Tuberculosis[edit]

The claim in the last paragraph according to which Feynman diagnosed his first wife’s disease as tuberculosis and was laughed at by the doctors is inaccurate. Here is what the book actually says:

[...] I go down to the library at Princeton and look up lymphatic diseases, and find “Swelling of the Lymphatic Glands. (1) Tuberculosis of the lymphatic glands. This is very easy to diagnose...” – so I figure this isn’t what Arlene has, because the doctors are having trouble trying to figure it out.
I start reading about some other diseases: lymphodenema, lymphodenoma, Hodgkin’s disease, all kind of other things; they’re all cancers of one crazy form or another. [...]
At any rate, I read through all the lymphatic diseases and decided that the most likely possibility was that Arlene had an incurable disease.
[...]
When I got to her house, she showed me the report. It said, “Biopsy shows tuberculosis of the lymphatic gland.”
That really got me. I mean, that was the first goddamn thing on the list! I passed it by, because the book said it was easy to diagnose, and because the doctors were having so much trouble trying to figure out what it was. I assumed they had checked the obvious case. [...] Otherwise, I would have suggested it right off [...].

See pages 35-40 of the 2001, published by W. W. Norton & Company (ISBN 978-0393320923).

--AmbrosiaSnail (talk) 01:19, 11 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]